Migration Control and Access to Welfare; the Precarious Inclusion
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Migration Control and Access to Welfare Over the past decades, European states have increasingly limited irregular migrants’ access to welfare services as a tool for migration control. Still, irregular migrants tend to have access to certain basic services, although frequently of a subordinate, arbitrary, and unstable kind. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Norway, this book sheds light on ambiguities in the state’s response to irregular migration that simultaneously cut through law, policy, and practice. Carefully examining the complex interplay between the geopolitical management of territory and the biopolitical management of populations, the book argues that irregularised migrants should be understood as precariously included in the welfare state rather than simply excluded. The notion of precarious inclusion highlights the insecure and unpredictable nature of the inclusive practises, underscoring how limited access to welfare does not necessarily contradict restrictive migration policies. Taking the situated encounters between irregularised migrants and service providers as its starting point for exploring broader questions of state sovereignty, biopolitics, and borders, Migration Control and Access to Welfare offers insightful analyses of the role of life, territory, and temporality in contemporary politics. As such, it will appeal to scholars of migration and border studies, gender research, social anthropology, geography, and sociology. Marry-Anne Karlsen is Researcher at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen, Norway. On Edge: Ethnographies and Theories of Threshold Phenomena Series Editors: Mark Graham is Head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. He is the author of Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory. Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography and co-editor of Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. This series seeks to explore the circumstances that compel subjects, life-forms, and material things to reimagine, redefine and reorder their existence at the edge of experience and social orders. Concerned with the ever-present but often unarticu- lated doubt embedded in everyday life and based on a metaphysics of emergence, novelty and creativity as forces in their own right, it welcomes anthropological and trans-disciplinary studies of transformations and threshold phenomena, such as crises, disasters and catastrophes, deaths and births, sexualities, rituals of tran- sition, and social movements. With attention to phenomena that lie beyond the reach of everyday experience, whether these be life forms such as bacteria, material processes such as rusting, or the uncanny dimensions of the cultural and social, On Edge: Ethnographies and Theories of Threshold Phenomena encourages studies that develop innova- tive methodologies, including those informed by post-humanist perspectives, and seeks to make space for inventive and experimental projects. Titles in the Series: Impossible Refuge The Control and Constraint of Refugee Futures Georgina Ramsay Migration Control and Access to Welfare The Precarious Inclusion of Irregular Migrants in Norway Marry-Anne Karlsen For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ On-Edge-Ethnographies-and-Theories-of-Threshold-Phenomena/book-series/ ASHSER1447 Migration Control and Access to Welfare The Precarious Inclusion of Irregular Migrants in Norway Marry-Anne Karlsen First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Marry-Anne Karlsen The right of Marry-Anne Karlsen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis. com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Karlsen, Marry-Anne, author. Title: Migration control and access to welfare : the precarious inclusion of irregular migrants in Norway / Marry-Anne Karlsen. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: On edge: ethnographies and theories of threshold phenomena | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021008577 (print) | LCCN 2021008578 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367742133 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367742164 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003156598 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Illegal aliens—Government policy—Norway. | Norway—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | Norway—Social policy—21st century. | Public welfare—Norway. | Welfare recipients—Norway. Classification: LCC JV8252 .K37 2021 (print) | LCC JV8252 (ebook) | DDC 362.89/912056109481—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008577 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008578 ISBN: 978-0-367-74213-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-74216-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-15659-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003156598 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 PART I Producing precarity 23 1 Exceptional care 25 2 Moral bordering 48 PART II Blurred borders 67 3 Healthcare providers as petty sovereigns 69 4 Materialising and negotiating borders through administrative practices 90 PART III Temporal tensions 111 5 Healthcare through the temporal lens of migration control 113 Conclusion 137 References 143 Index 163 Acknowledgements This book was made possible by the support of a number of people to whom I will be forever grateful. Most of all, I would like to thank the people who shared their time and experiences with me during fieldwork. Thank you for your willingness to speak with me and help me learn, and to those of you I came to know over time, for letting me into your lives. I also want to thank the healthcare centre for undoc- umented migrants in Oslo, the Robin Hood house in Bergen, and Mennesker i Limbo in Oslo, for welcoming me when I did important parts of my fieldwork. The book builds mainly on my doctoral research, which was part of the inter- disciplinary research project Provision of Welfare to Irregular Migrants (PRO- VIR). It also draws on insight from my postdoctoral research conducted as part of the multidisciplinary project Waiting for an Uncertain Future: The Temporalities of Irregular Migration (WAIT), which provided me with the opportunity to revisit the field and extend my ethnographic research amongst irregularised migrants in Norway. Both projects were generously funded by the Research Council of Nor- way (RCN) through the programmes VAM (PROVIR) and SAMKUL (WAIT). I thank the RCN and the University of Bergen (UiB) for supporting my research and for providing financial support to make this book open access. I am profoundly grateful to Christine M. Jacobsen, my supervisor, mentor, and project leader of both PROVIR and WAIT. Your always critical eye, construc- tive comments, encouragements, and guidance in the academic world have been invaluable. Thanks also go to Knut Hidle, my co-supervisor, for your generous support and enthusiasm. It has been a privilege to be part of two highly intellectually stimulating inter- disciplinary projects. I particularly want to acknowledge the contributions of the core group of researchers in PROVIR in developing my main argument on pre- carious inclusion, which, in addition to Jacobsen, consisted of Karl Harald Svig, Synnve Bendixsen, Andrea Sssman, and Njål Wang Andersen. I would also like to thank the master’s-level students who were part of the project: Regine Karlsen, Faustin Gasana, Silje Thowsen, Laila Dawn Ljosdal, and Siri Knapskog, and all the network partners and others who generously provided input and engaged in discussions on irregularised migrants and welfare in a series of seminars, work- shops, and conferences organised by the project. I want to thank in particular Nicholas De Genova, Heide Castaeda, Andrew Lattas, Shahram Khosravi, Acknowledgements vii Bridget Anderson, Mette Anderson, Henriette Sinding Aasen, Milena Chimienti, Ursula Karl-Trummer, Gregor Noll, Sébastien Chauvin, Nando Sigona, Elaine Chase, Miriam Ticktin, and Linda Bosniak. I would also like to express my grati- tude to Christina Brux Mburu for our many conversations during fieldwork and Halvar A. Kjærre for inspiring discussions and helpful comments during the final stages of my PhD thesis. Particularly heartfelt thanks to Kari Anne Drangsland for your encouragement, conversations, and comments throughout the process of writing the PhD thesis and the book. This research has also benefitted from the support I have received from the dif- ferent institutions and academic communities I have been affiliated with during this process: Uni Research Rokkansenteret (now NORCE), Bergen International Migration And Ethnic Relations Research Unit (IMER Bergen), and the Depart- ment of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, each